May 25--COLEBROOK -- Renewable energy is now an American mantra, but homeowner Stephen King has learned that a legal limbo awaits anyone who wakes up to discover that a wind farm might be going up next door.

Because of a loophole that allows zoning boards to approve test towers for wind turbines without notifying neighbors, residents near terrain favorable for wind energy could face the prospect of a major wind energy project being built in their community with limited ability to challenge it.

What's more, the state, through its clean energy grants and its final permitting authority -- the Connecticut Siting Council -- inadvertently supports the bypassing of local zoning during a wind energy development.

That is the issue being tested as Connecticut's first potential site for a wind farm has entered its research phase on the western fringes of the Hartford suburbs.

Last fall, two politically connected wind-energy entrepreneurs who run BNE Energy Inc. of Waterbury, cleared 2 acres along Route 44 in Colebrook and put up a 180-foot meteorological tower to test the feasibility of developing a wind farm. The tower has anemometers and wind vanes to test the speed and direction of wind over eight months to a year, data that are required before the siting council can begin the approval process.

Even though the test tower could lead directly to a commercial enterprise -- within a year or two, as many as five, 320-foot turbines with blades as long as 115 feet could be whirling over the site -- and even though the proposed wind facility would be in a residential zone, the town of Colebrook issued permits for the project without a public hearing or notifying neighbors.

That decision -- affirmed at a contentious zoning board of appeals hearing in Colebrook in February -- is now being challenged by King and other neighbors in a case scheduled to reach Superior Court in Litchfield in August.

King, a network manager for a Torrington manufacturing company whose house and land borders the BNE site on Flagg Hill Road, first learned about the wind farm while making coffee in early December. Through the windows of his kitchen, King saw a Volvo excavator widening an access road in the woods south of his home.

When he called a neighbor about the excavator, King learned that about 2 acres on the 75-acre property owned by BNE had been cleared and that the town had approved a permit to install the research tower.